We study the targeting of political advertising by presidential candidates on television. For targeted advertising to have value, the audiences for television programs must differ in meaningful ways and advertising must be effective. We estimate a model of targeted advertising. Our results suggest the function of television advertising is primarily to persuade. Moreover, we find that there is sufficient variation in viewer characteristics across television programs to allow for effective targeting. The most effective targeting strategies therefore involve both parties adopting similar strategies of advertising primarily on programs with audiences containing many swing voters. Actual candidate behavior is largely consistent with this strategy indicating that candidates seem to accurately believe that the function of television advertising is to persuade voters. Nonetheless, we are able to uncover specific ways in which candidates could improve their advertising by identifying particularly effective shows and by quantifying the tradeoff between cost and effectiveness.
Targeting Political Advertising on Television
* Excellent research assistance from Roger Cordero is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank James Adams, Dan Butler, Brett Gordon, Alan Gerber, Don Green, Seth Hill, Greg Huber, Matias Iaryczower, Costas Panagopoulos, Ryan Moore, Erik Snowberg, Alan Wiseman, the editors and reviewers at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and participants of seminars at Columbia, MIT, NYU, University of Miami, University of Rochester, Yale University, Quantitative Marketing and Economics Conference (Rochester, 2011), Summer Institute on Competitive Strategy (Berkeley, 2011), the American Political Science Association meetings (Washington DC, 2010), the Choice Symposium meetings (Key Largo, 2010), the Conference on Political Economy and Institutions (Baiona, 2010), the Marketing Science conference (Cologne, 2010), the Midwest Political Science Association meetings (Chicago, 2010), and the Wallis Political Economy conference (Rochester, 2010), for helpful comments and suggestions.
Lovett M, Peress M (2015), "Targeting Political Advertising on Television". Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 10 No. 3 pp. 391–432, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00014107
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